I was just pointing out that it is better to have the title/tag layout put together in a manner that is more consistent with bot crawls, so as to help with SE traffic. Every little thing is a help, especially with Google seemingly having the runs with this latest update/push.
Thanks for clearing that up - it still has noting to do with the posters problems. Outside of looking at his home page, no one really dug into it to discover (as did I) the true problem. I just didn't want to confuse him more... This - I don't get really.... All we had was a TBPR and Back links export... it has nothing to do with SERPs.... data refreshes are every 1-2 days now...
Personally I would image that Google would just fine the <title> tab and extract it's contents from it no matter where it is in the Header. I would say there is about 50 / 50 sites that do it my way and your way.
Right, I have 3 sites that is using the same / similar design, but all of the content on them is totally different. 1 is a freebies directory, 1 is a web hosting directory and the other is an affiliate programs directory. Are these 3 sites just fine as the design is similar, but the content is totally different. The 3 sites in question has also been on the web for about 3 years and they all have alright rankings with my main one of these 3 sites having very good rankings.
Common design elements won’t cause any grief. As for the other site(s) – I still have to wonder. Couldn’t we simply make the UK specific stuff a subDomain of the core site (the .com) and then keep the UK specific content there and remove the dupes into the core site. This would give a seamless flow around ONE single site while maintaining geographically diverse elements. This would also bode well for the over-all site’s link profile. Obviously we would 301 redirect all of the old pages to the corresponding ones on the .com and ultimately redirect the entire domain at the registrar level. To me the whole juggling act of getting things ‘SEO ship shape’, not too mention managing the 2 sites in the current configuration, would be best served by a sub-domain approach for the UK centric content. Leaving things as it, certainly CAN be done (SEO fixes) – it just seems troublesome from so many angles for me.
OK! I have only just read your replies. I didn't receive an email so I thought I hadn't got anymore replies to this thread. I have now taken action before reading what you have said. Please look at the new http://www.simplysearch4it.co.uk. It has the same design, but it is now just a UK product price comparison while the products.simplysearch4it.com is a US product price comparison so the design is the same but all the information is different apart from the TOS and Contact page and little bits like that being similar and having similar things in it. I have also used 301 redirect from the all other sections from the .co.uk domain to point to the .com domain plus the shopping.simplysearch4it.co.uk now points 301 redirects to the root of co.uk. Do you think this is fine, although, I don't want to have any negative effects when it comes to SEO so could the same design cause a seo problem or a penalty. Do u think it would still be best to move it over to the .com domain and just have a subdomain like uk.shopping.simplysearch4it.com? What would be the best way to do the sub domain? One more thing is that if I move the .co.uk to the .com using a sub domain then how would google know that this is UK content and should be placed in the google.co.uk search engine. This is my target audience and I have my site listed there and want it to say listed there. Also, what about advertising the .co.uk information on the .com site, would web directories and other sites still accept listings that are submitted using the .co.uk domain as I find alot of web directories don't like sub domain submissions and .co.uk content is an area that I need to promote directly by itself to the UK audience. Thanks!
If putting .co.uk onto sub domain .com then I would do it. But I am a little worried about advertising it in web directories and also if the site will get de-indexed or not within google.co.uk. Am I worrying over nothing yet again.
John, I really don't think that the order of your header tags is causing these changes. They may affect your position, but they will not cause your ranking to go up and down. It's probably not the duplicate site or anything else you've done. You first inclination, a penality, was probably correct. Let me give you some background about my site. I run a poetry/writing website, MoonTownCafe.com, and have about 100,000 pages of unique content. We currently have a google PR of 5, but this has come down from a 6. Last month, we had 78,000 pages indexed by Google, now about 30,000. 6 months ago we had about 700 backlinks on Google, now about 61. In the meantime, backlinks from Yahoo have grown from 3,500 to about 4,300. We have never spammed our site, but I am convinced that we are receiving some sort of penality. As our site has grown in size, audience, and content our rankings have gone down. I really believe that Google may fall as the search engine leader if they do not start delivering the most relavant search results. I've been to all of my competitor's pages and they are not even close to ours yet for many searches we are burried in the results. Right now, Yahoo accounts for over 75% of our search engine traffic. I would love to know what's going on with our standings on Google, but for now I just enjoy the results that Yahoo has been delivering. Kyle Olechnowicz
Our situations are slightly different. I still think I have a penalty due to duplication of content and also using the same site design. I know the meta tags doesn't matter what order they are in and only ended up changing them on 1 site and didn't bother with the rest. The thing with mine is that I had quite a bit of duplicate content on the .co.uk site which was also used on the .com site. The design of both of the sites were slightly different. About 2 - 3 months ago I then decided that the design of the sites were not professional at all and wanted to make them much more professional although the homepage still needs some work. I then re-did the .com site and then just used the exact design on the .co.uk site as there were both related to each other. 2 - 3 months later and my traffic drops. I then look in Google and found that my pages indexed were going more in supplemental results and I started getting hardly any traffic. I looked in Yahoo, and most of my listings for the .com site were gone also and I looked in MSN and my site is still listed there but getting less traffic to what it normally use to. So it looks like it is because of duplicate content and the same design. I checked the homepage of both of the sites and the content was something like 86% the same. I have now improved things and will keep finding ways of making the duplicate less duplicated. Infact I have nearly finished removing all of the duplicate content and am now thinking of doing a redesign on the .co.uk site which is now just a product price comparison instead of a portal site that also included games, web directory, articles, etc.